PROLOGUE
The dead don't lie. That was the first thing they taught Ada Mercer in medical school, and the last thing she believed by the time she was thirty-five years old and standing over a steel table in the basement of the Blackwood County courthouse with a dead man's head in her hands.
His name was Daniel Pryce. Forty-two. Found Tuesday morning, October 16, 2007, by his housekeeper, on the rug of his lake house outside Harrow's Mill, Pennsylvania — an empty pill bottle on the nightstand, a glass of water, a note in his own handwriting that said I'm sorry. Forgive me. The sheriff called it a suicide before the body was cold. The newspapers called it a tragedy before the week was out. His business partner — Nathaniel Crane, forty-one, already the golden boy of Harrow's Mill — gave a eulogy at the funeral about grief and grace, and then he bought out Daniel's half of their company for pennies and never spoke of him again.
But the dead don't lie, and Daniel Pryce's body told Ada Mercer a different story.
Behind his left ear, half-hidden in the hairline, was a puncture mark no bigger than a freckle. And in the deep tissue beneath it, when she sectioned it on Thursday, October 18, her scalpel found what the pill bottle was meant to hide: midazolam, a surgical sedative, in a concentration that said injection, not ingestion. Daniel Pryce hadn't swallowed those pills. Someone had put him to sleep first — and then arranged the scene.
Ada wrote it down. Cause of death: homicide. Manner: injected sedative overdose, staged as suicide.
Fifteen days later, on Friday, November 2, 2007, a second report appeared in the county file. Same case number. Same letterhead. Cause of death: suicide, self-administered overdose. And at the bottom, a signature that looked almost exactly like hers — almost, but not quite, because the forger hadn't known that Ada Mercer crossed her t with a little hook at the top, a habit from Catholic school she'd never broken.
She refused to certify the amended finding. She said so on the record, in a hearing room, with her voice shaking and her hands flat on the table.
On Thursday, March 13, 2008, the state medical board revoked her license for "refusing to certify a lawful finding."
She was thirty-six years old. She never practiced medicine again.
Instead she went to work for her uncle's funeral home in Harrow's Mill, and she learned a second trade — the quiet, careful art of preparing the dead for the living to say goodbye. And in the back room of Mercer Funeral Home, behind a panel in the oak desk that had been her grandfather's, she built a drawer that didn't officially exist. In it she kept the only copies that mattered: her original autopsy report on Daniel Pryce. The tissue-block log. The inventory sheet showing the missing midazolam vial — signed out of her own locked cabinet four days before Daniel died, by her own assistant, a twenty-three-year-old named Peter Sallow.
She kept them for eighteen years.
She told herself she was keeping them for justice. The truth was simpler and sadder: she was keeping them because they were the only proof she'd ever had that she hadn't imagined it — that she had been right, once, and the world had punished her for it.
On Monday morning, March 9, 2026, the phone rang at Mercer Funeral Home, and the dead started telling the truth again.
CHAPTER 1
Howard Bell had been sixty-eight years old and had worked for Nathaniel Crane's campaigns since before Ada lost her license. Heart attack, the paramedics said. Found at his desk at the campaign office on Sunday night, cold coffee beside him, a stack of donor lists under his elbow. A clean death. A tired old man's death.
Ada had prepared a hundred men like Howard Bell. She worked the way she always worked — slowly, respectfully, her hands remembering what her mind tried not to. It was while she was washing his hair that she saw it.
Behind his left ear, half-hidden in the hairline, a puncture mark no bigger than a freckle.
Her hands stopped. The room tilted, very slightly, the way it had tilted eighteen years ago in the courthouse basement. She leaned closer. She parted the thin gray hair with her fingertips.
Same mark. Same place. Same size.
Same needle mark. Same lie. Eighteen years apart.
She sat down on the stool in the corner of the prep room and put her head between her knees until the tilting stopped. When she could stand, she locked the prep room door, took out her phone, and photographed the mark from three angles. Then she finished preparing Howard Bell with hands that did not shake, because Ada Mercer's hands had never shaken, not once, not even on the worst day of her life — and this, she understood with a cold and terrible clarity, was worse.
That night she opened the hidden drawer for the first time in eleven months.
The reports were there, exactly as she'd left them, in their archival sleeves. Her original autopsy report on Daniel Pryce, dated October 18, 2007, in her own handwriting — the t crossed with its little hook. The tissue-block log: twelve paraffin blocks, retained per protocol, stored at the county facility under seal. The inventory sheet: one vial of midazolam, 5 mg, signed out October 12, 2007, by P. Sallow.
She spread them on the desk under the green banker's lamp, and she looked at them for a long time.
Someone had killed Howard Bell the same way they'd killed Daniel Pryce. And Howard Bell had spent the last eighteen years inside Nathaniel Crane's campaigns — the man who was, at this very moment, the beloved mayor of Harrow's Mill, sixty years old, silver-haired, the kind of man people described as a public servant, the kind of man whose face was already on billboards along Route 9.
Because on Saturday — five days from now — Nathaniel Crane was going to announce he was running for governor.
Ada picked up her phone and called the one person she hadn't spoken to in eleven months. Not the police. Not the papers.
"Mercer Funeral Home," she said when the voicemail picked up, "this is Ada. I need the county storage manifest for tissue blocks, case number 07-114. And Mara — don't tell anyone I called."
She hung up, and she realized her hands were shaking after all.
Eighteen years, and it had finally started again.
CHAPTER 2
Nathaniel Crane had been beautiful at forty-one and was magnificent at sixty. That was the problem with hating him: the cameras loved him, and Harrow's Mill loved what the cameras loved.
Ada watched the announcement from the back of the town hall on Saturday, March 14, 2026, standing between a stack of folding chairs and a Girl Scout troop selling cookies. She hadn't planned to come. She'd told herself she was done watching him. But Howard Bell's puncture mark had followed her into every dream for five nights, and she'd woken that morning knowing she needed to see his face while he lied.
"My friends," Crane said from the podium, the sun coming through the tall windows behind him like a special effect, "Harrow's Mill taught me everything I know about service. And now I want to take those lessons to Harrisburg."
Applause like weather. Ada watched his hands — steady, open, palms out, the gesture of a man with nothing to hide. She remembered those same hands at Daniel Pryce's funeral, eighteen years ago, folded over a eulogy. She remembered the scholarship fund Crane had established in Daniel's name — the Daniel Pryce Memorial Scholarship, fifty thousand dollars a year to a Harrow's Mill senior, funded, the plaque said, by his grieving partner.
What the plaque didn't say was where the money came from. Daniel's half of Pryce & Crane Development had been worth just under two million dollars in October 2007. The buy-sell agreement gave the surviving partner ninety days to purchase at a valuation set by — Ada had looked this up once, in the law library, on a rainy afternoon she was ashamed of — an appraiser chosen by the surviving partner.
Crane had bought Daniel's half for four hundred thousand dollars, eleven weeks after the funeral.
"I was the coroner," Ada whispered to no one, there in the back of the town hall with cookie crumbs under her shoes. "He made me the criminal."
The woman beside her — late twenties, dark hair pulled back, a press badge that said Capital Ledger — glanced over. "Sorry?"
"Nothing," Ada said.
But the woman was looking at her now with the particular attention of someone who'd been looking for a face. "Ada Mercer?" she said quietly. "Mara Ellison. I've been trying to reach you."
Ada's blood went cold. "I don't talk to reporters."
"Howard Bell died Monday." Mara's voice was low, almost kind. "You're the funeral director who prepared him. And eighteen years ago you were the coroner who wouldn't sign off on Daniel Pryce."
Around them, the applause swelled. Crane was holding up both hands, laughing, blessing them.
"I'm not interested," Ada said, and walked out into the March sunlight, and didn't stop walking until she reached her car.
That night, someone broke into Mercer Funeral Home.
They came through the back window of the arrangement office — jimmied, not smashed, professional. Ada found the mud on the carpet at six the next morning when she came in early, because she hadn't slept anyway. She stood in the doorway with her coat still on and her heart hammering, and she did the inventory the way she'd been trained: nothing taken from the cash box. Nothing taken from the supply cabinet. The oak desk — her grandfather's desk — closed, locked, undisturbed.
But the blotter was crooked. A quarter inch off. Ada Mercer noticed quarter inches; it was her whole profession, noticing quarter inches.
They hadn't found the drawer. But they'd been looking for something, and they'd known which desk to try.
She called the police and reported the break-in, because not reporting it would have been suspicious. She did not mention the drawer. She did not mention that her hands, when the young officer asked if anything was missing, were perfectly steady.
"Nothing's missing," she told him. It was almost true.
After he left, she sat at the desk, opened the hidden drawer, and counted the sleeves. Twelve reports. Twelve sleeves. All present.
One drawer. Twelve reports. Zero alibis.
She took the Daniel Pryce file and the inventory sheet and the tissue-block log, sealed them in a plain manila envelope, and drove them to the safe-deposit box at First Harrow Bank — the box she'd rented in 2009 under her mother's maiden name, the box no one knew about. She kept one thing back: a photocopy of the inventory sheet, folded small.
Then she drove home, and she called Mara Ellison.
"You have forty-eight hours," Ada said. "After that I stop answering."
"Forty-eight hours is plenty," Mara said. "Can I come tonight?"
"No. Tuesday." Ada looked at the photocopy on her kitchen table — P. Sallow, 10/12/07, midazolam 5mg, 1 vial. "And Mara — come alone. And don't park on my street."
CHAPTER 3
Peter Sallow had been twenty-three years old in the fall of 2007, fresh out of his mortuary-science program, all elbows and earnestness, the kind of young man who alphabetized the specimen jars without being asked. Ada had liked him. That was the part she couldn't forgive herself for — she'd liked him, she'd written him a recommendation letter, she'd told the board at his licensing hearing that he was the most careful assistant she'd ever trained.
On Tuesday, March 17, 2026, Peter Sallow was fifty-two years old, and he was the chief of staff of Nathaniel Crane's gubernatorial campaign, and he was standing in the doorway of Mercer Funeral Home at nine in the morning with a smile like a sealed envelope.
"Ada," he said. "It's been too long."
She didn't invite him in. She stood in the doorway the way she'd stood eighteen years ago in a hearing room, hands flat, voice level. "What do you want, Peter?"
"Just paying respects. Howard was a good man." The smile didn't move. "Terrible thing. Heart attack, they said."
"They did say that."
A beat. Somewhere inside the funeral home, the old clock ticked.
"You know," Peter said, conversational, "the campaign's doing a big volunteer appreciation at the lake house next month. Daniel's old place — Crane kept it, you know. Turned it into a retreat center. You should come. For old times' sake."
It took Ada a moment to understand what he'd just done. Then she understood, cold and clean: he'd told her he knew. He knew she knew about the lake house, about Daniel, about all of it — and he was telling her that the place where it happened was now theirs, landscaped and rewired, and she could come visit any time, like a tourist.
"Get off my porch, Peter."
He went, still smiling. But at the bottom of the steps he turned. "Eighteen years is a long time to hold a grudge, Ada. Some drawers are better left closed."
She watched him drive away. Then she went inside, locked the door, and called Mara Ellison.
"Change of plan," she said. "Not tonight. Now. And bring everything you've got on Peter Sallow."
Mara arrived at noon with a laptop, a recorder, and a manila folder thick as a sandwich. They sat at Ada's kitchen table, and Mara opened the folder, and Ada learned what eighteen years of Capital Ledger archives could tell you about a man.
Peter Sallow had left the coroner's office three weeks after Ada's license was revoked — March 2008, "to pursue opportunities in the private sector." By June he was on Crane's mayoral campaign staff. By 2012 he was Crane's deputy chief of staff at city hall. The trajectory was a straight line, drawn with a ruler.
"Here's what I can't find," Mara said. "Any record of what he did with the eighteen months between your hearing and the campaign job. It's just — blank. Like someone wiped it."
Ada unfolded the photocopy she'd kept back and laid it on the table between them.
Mara read it. Looked up. "Midazolam. Signed out by Sallow. Four days before Pryce died."
"From my locked cabinet," Ada said. "I kept the key on my person at all times. Except —" She stopped. She'd never said this part out loud, not in eighteen years. "Except the afternoon of October 12, 2007. I left my coat in the office during Daniel Pryce's — during a meeting with the sheriff. Twenty minutes. Peter was the only other person with a key to that room."
"Did you ever confront him?"
"I was thirty-five and about to lose everything. I told myself there had to be an explanation." Ada's laugh was a dry, broken thing. "There's a special kind of stupid that only smart women are capable of, Mara. I was a genius at it."
Mara was quiet for a moment. Then: "Ada. I need to show you something, and I need you to not react until I've finished."
She turned the laptop around. On the screen was a scan of a letter, handwritten, dated March 2, 2026 — one week before he died.
Ada — If you're reading this, then it finally happened, and I'm sorry I didn't have the spine sooner. In October 2007 I drove a car for Peter Sallow. I didn't ask what was in the bag. I swear to God I didn't know until the papers the next week. The lake house. I moved something from the lake house that night, and I've carried it every day since. The money wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth it. Forgive me. — H.B.
"Where did you get this?" Ada whispered.
"It came to the Ledger newsroom yesterday. No return address. Postmarked Harrow's Mill, March 5." Mara met her eyes. "Howard Bell wrote you a letter, Ada. He was going to talk."
Ada looked at the letter for a long time. Then she stood up, walked to the back room, and opened the panel in the oak desk — the desk was here, in her house now; she'd moved it after the break-in — and she took out the one sleeve she hadn't put in the safe-deposit box.
"Open the drawer, Mara," she said, laying the archival sleeve on the kitchen table. "Read what they buried."
Inside was her original autopsy report on Daniel Pryce. October 18, 2007. Her handwriting. The little hook on the t.
Mara read it twice. When she looked up, her eyes were wet. "This is — Ada, this is a murder case. This was always a murder case."
"I know."
"Will you go on the record?"
Ada thought about eighteen years. She thought about the hearing room, and the forged signature, and the scholarship plaque with its lying words. She thought about Howard Bell's puncture mark, no bigger than a freckle, and a letter that had arrived three days too late to save him.
"Yes," she said. "But not to you. To the Attorney General. We drive to Harrisburg today."
Mara blinked. "Today?"
"Eighteen years I kept the truth in a drawer." Ada was already reaching for her coat. "Today the drawer opens."
CHAPTER 4
The drive to Harrisburg took two hours, and Ada spent most of it with her hands folded in her lap, watching Pennsylvania unspool outside the window — the bare March trees, the billboards with Nathaniel Crane's silver hair and his slogan, A Steady Hand for Pennsylvania.
"A steady hand," Ada said. "He's got a steady hand, all right."
Mara glanced over. "You okay?"
"No. But I'm going anyway."
They'd called ahead — Mara knew a deputy in the AG's public integrity unit, a woman named Diane Okafor who owed Mara a favor from the casino-licensing story. Okafor met them in a conference room on the seventh floor with no windows and a tape recorder she placed openly on the table.
"Ms. Mercer," Okafor said, "I want to be straight with you. You're bringing me an eighteen-year-old homicide allegation against a sitting mayor who's about to be the frontrunner for governor. I need more than a story. I need paper."
Ada opened her bag and laid it out, piece by piece, the way she'd laid out instruments on a steel tray for twenty years: the original autopsy report. The tissue-block log — twelve blocks, case 07-114, retained per protocol, storage manifest from the county facility. The inventory sheet with Peter Sallow's signature. The photographs of Howard Bell's puncture mark, time-stamped March 9. Howard Bell's letter.
Okafor went through it all twice without speaking. Then she looked up.
"The tissue blocks," she said. "They still exist?"
"Per the manifest I pulled last week. Sealed, climate-controlled, county facility." Ada's voice was steady. "Midazolam metabolizes, but the injection-site tissue was fixed in paraffin within forty-eight hours. A competent lab can still find it."
Okafor nodded slowly. "And the forged signature on the amended report — you can testify it isn't yours?"
"I crossed my t's with a hook. The forger didn't know." Ada almost smiled. "Eighteen years, and it comes down to penmanship."
"What do you want from this office, Ms. Mercer?"
"I want Daniel Pryce exhumed. I want Howard Bell exhumed." Ada leaned forward. "And I want it done before Saturday's rally, because on Saturday Nathaniel Crane is going to stand on a stage in Harrow's Mill and ask this commonwealth to trust him, and I am done letting him bury people."
Okafor studied her for a long moment. Then she switched off the recorder.
"Off the record," she said, "my office has had a file on Crane for two years. Donor fraud, mostly — small stuff, hard to prove, the kind of thing that dies in committee. This —" she tapped the autopsy report — "this doesn't die in committee."
She switched the recorder back on. "On the record: we'll take it from here. And Ms. Mercer — don't go home tonight. Go somewhere else. Somewhere he can't find you."
Ada laughed, a short, sharp sound. "He's known where I am for eighteen years, Ms. Okafor. That's rather the point."
They drove back in silence. It was dark by the time they reached Harrow's Mill, and Mara insisted on walking Ada to her door, and Ada let her, because she was sixty — no, fifty-four, she was fifty-four, and suddenly she felt every year of it.
The house was dark. The desk was closed.
The blotter was crooked.
Ada stopped in the doorway of the back room with Mara behind her, and her heart did something slow and heavy in her chest. She'd moved the files to the safe-deposit box. She'd kept back only the one sleeve — the autopsy report — and that was in Harrisburg now, in Diane Okafor's hands.
There was nothing left in the drawer to steal.
But someone had been here anyway. And they'd left something.
On the blotter, centered with insulting precision, lay a single archival sleeve. The kind she used. The kind she'd bought in bulk in 2009 from a medical supply company in Pittsburgh.
Inside was an autopsy report on Daniel Pryce. Dated October 18, 2007. In handwriting that was almost — almost — hers.
Mara came up beside her. "Is that — did you leave that here?"
"No." Ada's voice sounded far away. "No, I didn't."
She picked it up with two fingers, the way she'd handle a contaminated slide. The report was hers in every particular — the phrasing, the measurements, the little hook on the t's — except one.
The toxicology section listed the sedative as midazolam, lot number ML-2011-0447.
Ada stared at it. Then she did something she hadn't done in eighteen years: she laughed, out loud, in the dark back room, with Mara staring at her.
"ML-2011," Ada said. "Do you know what that means, Mara?"
"What?"
"Lot numbers. ML is the manufacturer's code, and the next four digits are the year of manufacture." She held the sleeve up to the light. "This report says the midazolam that killed Daniel Pryce in October 2007 came from a lot manufactured in 2011."
Mara's breath caught. "It's a forgery."
"It's a plant." Ada's mind was racing now, the old coroner's mind, the one that noticed quarter inches. "Peter knew about the drawer. He helped me build it — God, he helped me build it, he held the panel while I fitted it. He knew I'd take the files to the authorities eventually. So he made a copy of my report — a perfect copy, eighteen years of practice reading my handwriting — and he changed one thing, one stupid thing, because he needed my file to contain a provable lie. So that when the AG's lab tested the tissue blocks and found real midazolam, Crane's lawyers could hold up this report and say: her evidence is fabricated. She's been fabricating for eighteen years."
She looked at Mara, and her eyes were bright and absolutely clear.
"The batch number doesn't lie, Mara. But Peter Sallow does. And he just told me exactly how scared they are."
She took out her phone and photographed the planted report from every angle. Then she sealed it in a bag, labeled it in her neat hand — PLANTED 3/17/26, DO NOT FILE WITH ORIGINALS — and set it aside for Diane Okafor.
"You were right to keep the originals in the bank," Mara said quietly.
"I was right about a lot of things," Ada said. "It just took me eighteen years to stop being polite about them."
CHAPTER 5
The court order came down on Thursday, March 19, 2026, signed by a judge in Harrisburg who didn't owe Nathaniel Crane anything. Two exhumations: Daniel Pryce, from the Harrow's Mill cemetery where eighteen years of scholarship ceremonies had been held over his grave; and Howard Bell, from the plot beside his wife of forty years.
Ada didn't attend. She'd seen enough of the dead for one lifetime, and besides — Diane Okafor had been clear. "You're our witness, not our audience. Stay available. Stay visible. Stay alive."
She stayed at the funeral home, and she worked, because the living still needed her — a viewing on Friday, a burial on Saturday morning — and because work was the only place her hands knew what to do. Mara camped in the arrangement office with her laptop, fielding calls, and twice Ada caught her looking up with an expression Ada recognized from her own mirror: the look of someone watching a story get bigger than the notebook.
On Friday afternoon, Okafor called.
"The paraffin blocks," she said without preamble. "The lab rushed them. Midazolam at the injection site in Daniel Pryce's tissue. Concentration consistent with your 2007 finding." A pause. "And Howard Bell — the ME found the puncture mark, Ada. Same place. Same size. The tox screen's still running, but —"
"But you know," Ada said.
"I know." Okafor's voice dropped. "Ada, I'm going to ask you something, and I need the truth. Is there anything in your files — anything at all — that isn't exactly what you say it is?"
Ada closed her eyes. "On Tuesday night someone planted a forged copy of my report in my desk. I photographed it, bagged it, and I was going to bring it to you tomorrow. The lot number's from 2011. It's a plant, Diane. I can prove it."
Silence. Then: "Bring it tonight. And Ada — good catch. That would have been a problem."
"It was a problem," Ada said. "It's just a problem I solved."
She hung up and stood there in the prep room with the phone in her hand, and Mara appeared in the doorway.
"They found it," Mara said. It wasn't a question.
"They found it." Ada set the phone down carefully, the way she'd set down instruments. "It's over, isn't it? The hiding part."
"The hiding part's over," Mara agreed. "The other part's just starting."
"What other part?"
Mara smiled, tired and bright. "The part where Nathaniel Crane finds out."
CHAPTER 6
They arrested him on Saturday, March 21, 2026, at 3:40 in the afternoon, on the stage at the Harrow's Mill fairgrounds, in front of four thousand people and every television camera in the commonwealth.
Ada watched it on the television in the arrangement office, with Mara's hand gripping her shoulder hard enough to bruise. Crane was mid-sentence — a steady hand for Pennsylvania — when the state troopers came up the side steps. The cameras caught his face in the half-second before the politician's mask came down: not guilt, not fear. Surprise. As if, after eighteen years, he had genuinely forgotten that consequences were a thing that happened to other people.
The charges scrolled along the bottom of the screen: homicide, Daniel Pryce (2007). Homicide, Howard Bell (2026). Forgery. Witness tampering. Conspiracy.
Peter Sallow was arrested at campaign headquarters an hour later, trying to shred something. The cameras caught that too.
Ada turned off the television.
They sat in silence for a while. Then Mara said, "You know what I keep thinking about? The scholarship. Fifty thousand dollars a year, in Daniel's name. He bought the boy's half of the company for pennies and then spent eighteen years buying a good name with the change."
"Eighteen years," Ada said. "That's the thing about burying the truth, Mara. You have to keep digging. And eventually the hole's so deep you can't climb out."
Her phone rang. Diane Okafor.
"It's done," Okafor said. "Both indictments. And Ada — the board called. The state medical board. They reviewed your 2008 revocation last year — quietly, after the donor-fraud file started growing. They voted to vacate it. Nineteen months ago. They sent the letter to your old address on Chestnut Street."
Ada went very still. "Vacated."
"Your license was restored in August 2024. You've been a licensed physician for nineteen months and nobody told you." Okafor's voice was gentle. "I'm sorry. I thought you should hear it from me before the papers file it under 'color.'"
After she hung up, Ada sat for a long time with the phone in her lap. Then she got up, walked to the back room, and opened the panel in the oak desk — the hidden drawer, the one Peter had helped her build, the one that had held eighteen years of her life.
It was empty now. Everything was in Harrisburg, or in the bank, or in evidence bags.
Except — at the very back, in the deepest corner, her fingers found one more sleeve. One she hadn't touched in years. One she'd forgotten she'd kept.
She drew it out into the light.
It was a death certificate. Jane Doe, 2009. A car accident, the report said — a single-car accident on Route 9, the month after Ada's license was revoked. The woman had been a clerk in the county records office. The clerk who'd processed the forged amended report. The clerk whose signature was on the filing stamp dated November 2, 2007.
And clipped to it, in Ada's own handwriting, dated spring 2009 — seventeen years ago — a note she'd written at 2 a.m. and never shown anyone:
Brake lines cut. Not an accident. He ties up loose ends.
She'd known, even then. She'd known, and she'd been too broken to do anything with knowing.
Mara came to the doorway. "Ada? What is it?"
Ada looked at the death certificate for a long moment. Then she folded it — carefully, precisely, the way she folded everything — and slid it into an envelope.
"Evidence," she said. "There's always one more drawer."
She picked up her phone and called Diane Okafor back.
Outside, the March light was going gold over Harrow's Mill. Somewhere across town, four thousand people were still standing in a fairground, staring at an empty stage. And in the back room of Mercer Funeral Home, Ada Mercer — physician, coroner, embalmer, witness — opened a fresh sleeve, labeled it in her neat hand, and began to write.
[END OF PART 1]
